ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how individuals make use of motivational resources in order to regulate their social relationships and social experience and thus create developmental adaptive environments that enhance or protect their action potentials. It is argued that the shaping and managing of social relationships involves goal-related processes that are likely to contribute to the continuity, coherence, and stabilization of core personality traits over the life course. The central argument is that the adaptation and stabilization of personality characteristics, as a result of regulatory processes in social relationships, prototypically occur in the context of expected and normative transitions. This is not to say that other more unexpected and more undesirable life transitions (e.g., divorce, death of a child) do not also involve relationship regulation. However, for reasons of clarity and space, the discussion here focuses exclusively on the mastery of normative life tasks and events. Normative life course transitions are defined here as highly predictable events that are expected to occur to most people in a society and are well structured with respect to the involved demands and challenges for the individual's motivational and self-regulatory resources and capacitities (Brandtstaedter & Rothermund, 2003; Cantor, Norem, Niedenthal, Langston, & Brower, 1987; Caspi & Moffitt, 1993; Heckhausen, 1999). The term norm here pertains to a social expectation rather than to a statistical norm. Prototypical examples of normative events are the birth of a sibling, school entry, entering the first job, marriage, first parenthood, and retirement. Normative transitions require adaptive efforts in personality-relationship transactions that are prototypical for the understanding of the lifelong dynamic interplay of personality, motivation, and social relationships. Typically, normative events involve necessary and inevitable changes in the individuals' social world, which are related to the activation (initiation, selection) or protection (reorganization, transformation, dissolution) of their social relationships. In this context, the term life transitions is used interchangeably with normative life events.
